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What We Do

Your Innovation Challenge

You struggle to unlock innovation in your organization. You know the only way to grow and sustain your business is to do something different. You have tried new approaches with varying results, but none of them yielded the outcomes that you need to achieve. You worry that without innovating, your organization will be left behind. You know what got you to this point will not get you where you need to go in the future.

What you need is to unlock innovation in your organization and achieve an enduring competitive advantage. One that goes deeper than the other solutions or frameworks that you have tried before.

Our decades of research have shown that leadership is the critical difference between organizations capable of innovating time and again – and those who struggle. Execution is no longer enough. Leadership as widely understood and practiced today is not what fosters continual innovation. Leaders need to develop and flex a new “muscle” – how to lead for innovation.

Today

Tomorrow

Core Competency

Execution

Execution & innovation

Mindset

Setting direction

Shaping context

Attention on

Where we are going
Minimizing difference

Why we exist
Amplifying differences

Inspire

Followers who execute

Community that innovates

We have a powerful new approach to this persistent problem that all leaders face in today’s world. Partnering with our clients, we advise leaders on how to shift their leadership mindset, encourage new behaviors, all of which foster a collective movement of innovation. We use sophisticated research methods developed at Harvard Business School to understand your organization. Your world. Your perspective.

Instead of trying to come up with a vision and make innovation happen themselves, a leader of innovation creates a place—a context, an environment—where people are willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires.

Know Your Innovation Potential

In ten years, 40% of today’s companies on the S&P 500 may no longer exist. For organizations to thrive in a world of rapid change and complexity, they need to innovate. The ability to do so is perhaps the only enduring competitive advantage.

We define innovation as the creation of something both novel and useful. It can be large or small, breakthrough or incremental. New products, services, business models, and processes are all examples of innovation. Organizations must engage everyone in the effort.

Our decades of research show that leadership is the critical difference between organizations capable of innovating time and again – and those who struggle.

We partner with leaders on the journey of learning to lead innovation and achieving high performance. Our data-driven approach guides leaders in identifying the right levers and actions necessary to achieve sustained innovation. Regardless of industry or geography, we help leaders to release the innovation potential in their talent and achieve high performance in their organization. The following services are the keys to unlocking these deeply impactful results:

Leadership to innovate: Managing a series of paradoxes to create a context that enables the willingness and ability to innovate within the organization.

With the iQ, we measure the six elements that are essential for creating and leading an innovative organization. These elements support the willingness and ability to innovate within organizations.

Shared Purpose

An organization’s purpose is its reason for being. It is not what a group does but why it does it.

Shared Purpose

Purpose is therefore about “why do we exist?” and “who we are.” A shared sense of purpose lifts people’s efforts above the level of everyday, self-centered activity, and it serves as a glue that integrates the work of one into the work of many.

Shared Values

Shared values are the foundational beliefs, standards, activities and/or principles that express what is truly important to the organization.

Shared Values

Collaboration. Innovative groups believe it is important to work in ways that allow diverse people to interact closely and to integrate their ideas.

Learning. Innovative organizations are receptive to new ways of doing things.

Responsibility. In innovative organizations, people share a deep sense of obligation to one another, and to the community as a whole.

Rules of Engagement for Interacting

Rules of engagement are the norms or expectations about how organization members should interact with one another.

Rules of Engagement for Interacting

Mutual Trust. Members of innovative organizations believe and act as though everyone in the organization is well-intended.

Mutual Respect. Members of innovative organizations believe and act as though everyone in the organization has something valuable to contribute.

Mutual Influence. Members of innovative organizations allow everyone in the organization to have the potential to influence outcomes and, often, participate in decision-making.

Rules of Engagement for Thinking

Rules of engagement are the norms or expectations about how organization members should think about solving problems.

Rules of Engagement for Thinking

Question everything. Innovative organizations tend to constantly question the status quo, as well as long-held assumptions and beliefs.

Be data-driven. Members of innovative organizations tend to provide evidence for their positions when advocating for their point of view and making decisions.

Think holistically (whole picture/see the whole). Members of innovative organizations tend to look at problems holistically, considering how its parts are interdependent.

Creative Abrasion

Creative abrasion is the organizational capability to generate a marketplace of ideas through discourse and debate.

Creative Abrasion

The development of innovative ideas rarely happens without diversity and constructive conflict. Therefore, creative abrasion requires that organization members have heated yet healthy exchanges about ideas through active listening, inquiry, and advocacy.

Creative Agility

Creative agility is the organizational capability to test and refine ideas through quick pursuit, reflection, and adjustment.

Creative Agility

Innovation happens through discovery-driven learning, wherein organization members act their way—as opposed to plan their way—toward breakthrough successes. Therefore, creative agility requires experimentation, and the capacity to take calculated risks and tolerate reasonable missteps or failures that may lead to new insights

Creative Resolution

Creative resolution is the organizational capability to do integrative decision-making.

Creative Resolution

The best innovations are often the result of combining different or even opposing ideas into novel solutions. Therefore, creative resolution requires resisting the urge to let one individual or group dominate (e.g. the bosses or the experts); it also requires resisting the urge to compromise or take the path of least resistance. Instead, creative resolution requires a patient and inclusive decision-making approach that allows for “both-and” versus “either-or” solutions to be embraced.

We systematically evaluate whether leaders have created the right environment within their organization for innovation to thrive. The iQ provides leaders with a mirror that reflects their culture and capacity to innovate. It integrates seamlessly into current objectives and innovation initiatives.

We work with clients in 4 steps:

A Proprietary Survey: We begin the process with a brief online survey that generates deep insights into the organization’s innovation culture and capabilities. The survey is typically taken by the leader and key team members, but can be applied more broadly.

Confidential Interviews: We dig deeper in confidential, one-on-one interviews that explore key insights from the survey and understand different perspectives.

Synthesis: Once this data has been gathered, we synthesize the results into a comprehensive view of the current state of leading innovation in the organization. We identify where the organization is strong and areas of improvement that when addressed will increase its ability to innovate. Moreover, through the iQ, we introduce a common language for innovation that engages everyone in the effort. This process encourages an open dialogue for raising critical issues and sharing new ideas.

Action: Using the results of the iQ, we guide clients in prioritizing actions to unleash greater innovation potential. As advisors, we work with the leader and his/her team to identify next steps that are high impact and sustainable for leading innovation. We offer support for a new approach to leadership that helps our clients succeed in complex and rapidly changing business environments.

Imagine what your organization could accomplish if it were able truly to unleash and harness the slices of genius of all organizational members to produce breakthrough innovations again and again.

Advisory Services

Once key organizational barriers to innovation are identified, we are ready to help leaders address critical areas in their organization’s culture, systems and practices. With our counsel, leaders identify actionable steps needed to create or revitalize a culture of innovation. We work with our clients to ensure that the right leadership, talent and behaviors are in place, whether that involves identifying new or existing talent, creating a new organizational design, benchmarking against competitors, and/ or evolving current systems.

Together, we help leaders to create an organizational environment in which people can combine their “slices of genius” into a collective movement of innovation, energized and ready to take on the challenges of tomorrow, known and unknown, predictable and unpredictable. With our guidance, our clients begin to lay the foundation for inventing their future.

Leading for Innovation Program

We offer a premier program called Leading for Innovation. The program takes an action-learning approach designed to build the mindset and capabilities necessary for leading innovation.

The program challenges your assumptions about how innovation happens, strengthens your leadership mindset, and shapes the way you work. You will be stretched: you will explore, learn, debate, and experiment in a hands-on environment. Ultimately, you will come away with a deeper understanding of how to lead for breakthrough innovation.

The program focuses on key pillars:

The role of the leader in innovation

The 6 paradoxes of leading innovation

Individual skills for creating a community

Rules of engagement

Building the capabilities to innovate

Should You Join?

You are a top executive and/or entrepreneur ready to transform your understanding of leadership and adopt the right mindset to build a truly innovative company. You want to bring your team along for the ride.